Jeff Landry says benefit of defending La. Ten Commandments law ‘outweighs’ any cost

MILWAUKEE (KLFY) — Gov. Jeff Landry said the state law mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms, and litigating its inevitable path to the Supreme Court, is worth any price.

In an exclusive interview with Nexstar’s NewsNation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday, Landry said “the benefit of what we’re trying to do certainly outweighs any of the expenditures.”

The law seeks to overturn the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, in which the justices ruled the government could not provide funding to nonsecular schools without violating the Establishment Clause. In 1980, the high court took on the Stone v. Graham case, where it ruled based on the Lemon test that a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in schools was unconstitutional.

“I think this is one of the cases where the (Supreme) Court has it wrong,” Landry said. “And so here is the question: If the Supreme Court has something wrong, why would you not want that to be corrected? What is the price you would pay to correct that?”

Landry said that he believes that having the Commandments posted in schools will help reduce crime and violence, using the recent shooting of former president Donald Trump by Thomas Matthew Crooks as an example.

“I would submit that maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging on (Crooks’) wall in the school that he was in, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot at the (former) president,” he said.

Landry also defended his recent veto of $1 million in state money earmarked for Catholic Charities of Acadiana for maintaining homeless shelters throughout Acadiana, on both fiscal and moral grounds.

“Especially in Louisiana, we have we have become accustomed, we have been addicted, the non-governmental organizations and charitable organizations, to the public trough,” Landry said. “That’s not where charitable organizations should seek their money. I’m Catholic, if Catholic Charities believes they need a million dollars, they can pass it in the second collection at Mass.”

He then took aim at the organization’s willingness to help undocumented immigrants.

“They are aiding and abetting the illegal immigration problem in this country,” he said. “If they believe that’s the direction Catholic Charities want to take, let them go to the parishioners and get their money out of the parishioners.”